Real. Smart. Now.

Want to move from mild-mannered geek to awe-inspiring tech presentation superhero?

After coaching almost 4000 presentations, I’ve realised that it’s quite simple to stand head,  shoulders,  abs and knees above the mediocre standards of most technical presenters.

Over the next 8 weeks or so, I’ll take you through what’s needed to become interesting, talked about, clear, relevant, clever and credible. Maybe even a little bit suave.

Here, then, is an overview of the 8 simple secrets to becoming a technical presentation superhero. Each step builds on the previous one, so you get the biggest bang for your buck implementing them in sequence.

1. Focus your presentation on sincere recommendations

A recommendation implies that:

• you are focusing on an action
• that action will benefit the people you are recommending it to
• you are not ‘selling’ this idea, or doing anything underhand or manipulative
• it’s out of your control whether we take you up or not
• you have a genuine desire to connect

In this way, your presentation becomes useful. (Don’t know how to decide what to put into a presention and what to leave out? This step will help you.)  Read some more about this here.

2. Speak so slowly you can hear each word you’re saying

Never have I ever had to get a presenter to speak faster. Never. Ever.

Nervous, subordinate people speak fast. Tricksy salespeople speak fast (‘fast-talker’ anyone?).  People with status take their time.

Until you get this down, all that advice about using active verbs and pointing at yourself when you say ‘Fabulous’ ( you are, but please don’t) is useless. You can’t change the way you’re expressing yourself until you can hear the way you’re expressing yourself. That sensation of the sentences just falling out of your mouth goes away when you slow down. (Don’t worry if you think you are an irretrievable motor-mouth. Help is on the way.) More about this here.

Planning a sincere recommendation and slowing down until you hear each word

corrects 90% of what’s wrong with modern presentations. Read them again.

The next steps are the magic.

3. Systematically answer our questions about how your recommendation solves our urgent problems

Structuring your session around our (silent, mental) questions is the key to being relevant. We have a few ‘what’ questions, but way more ‘how?’ and ‘Why?’ questions. Follow what’s going inside our heads, and we’ll wonder how you read our minds. Not as hard as it sounds. We won’t even notice this is what you’re doing – we’ll just think you’re smart. More here.

4. Keep your energy 5% above ours

Speakers often confuse high energy with fast pace. The key is raised energy but slow pace.

Speakers also confuse passion with ridiculously high energy. 50% above where we are is too much of a mismatch, unless you want to be some weird ‘motivational’ evangelist. 5% gently wakes us up. As we wake up, you move 5% higher. This is how you warm a group up – gently and at our pace. More here.

5. Separate the slides, handouts and prompts

I have so much to say on this topic I can barely contain myself. Suffice it to say that the visuals we need to follow your talk are so radically different from the reference we’ll need afterwards and from the notes you need to remember your points that it is madness to combine them. Don’t worry – I’ll walk you through this. (And by handouts I mean all post-presentation reference material – but that’s a little less pithy.)

6. Don’t plan a presentation, plan a conversation.

I know, I know, a presentation is a pretty strange type of conversation. However, all sorts of questions about calibration (level of detail, of formality, of jargon) are answered when you think: ‘If I were in conversation with someone from this group, how would I speak?’

7. Plan to speak for half the time

If you think it’s going to take 15 minutes, it will take at least 23. You can use what’s left over to expand, to answer questions, or just to delight people with an early finish. Running out of things to say is so rarely the problem… And when you’re done, you’re done. People will love you for it.

8. Separate the situation from your thoughts about the situation

Almost all of the fear about presenting comes from our thoughts about the situation. Speaking to groups is totally safe. And you don’t need hypnosis, NLP or beta-blockers to sort this one out.

***

What do you think? What’s number nine? And ten?

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Comments

In the comments from this last week’s article about technical presentation ‘crimes’ we began to discuss what the difference was between simplifying and dumbing down. Can the same piece of communication be both depending on the point of view of the audience, or are they fundamentally different?

Olivia Mitchell started the ball rolling:

The goal of simplifying is for the audience to be able to understand and remember what you say… What one audience may think is dumbed down will be perfect for another… I would recommend running the presentation past someone who has an equivalent level of knowledge to most of the audience and getting their feedback.

Chris Witt says:

I think the task is to break the topic into its most basic components and to show how they relate to each other.  I ask [technical professionals] to explain what they’re going to talk about to me, someone who is smart but ignorant… I let them use a whiteboard but no jargon… That’s how I have them begin — with a simple overview. They can always add complexity and depth as they go along, depending on the audience’s knowledge and interest.

And from a conversation I had with some of the smartest people I know, we came up with:

Simplifying is when you assume that people have the capability to learn and understand what you’re discussing, but don’t currently have enough information to do so.

Dumbing down is when you assume people are too stupid to understand, so you’re taking out any subtlety/complexity.

There is also a connotation with dumbing down that you’re maintaining control of information somehow.

Interesting, eh? See – check out the comments, post a question… it’s often where the action is…

Related articles

~ PowerPoint: We’ve been fooled…

~ What are the worst crimes in technical presentations?

~ 9 easy things you can do to stand out in technical presentations

In other news

Movies/Theatre/Music

Well,  S and I really liked The Watchmen. It seems from a poll of pretty much every other sentient being we know that we’re on our own here.

On Sunday we went to see a Kathakali performance of King Lear. Kathakali is a traditional form of Indian dance theatre. It blew my mind – genuinely riveting, and not in an I’m-being-respectful- of-other-people’s-cultures kind of way. There’s another production in May – booked in the diary already.

Monday was the Indigo Girls, live in Singapore. I’ve waited 15 years to see them live- they totally rock. 2 women, each with a banjo/guitar/ukulele (they changed instruments with literally every song), who create SUCH a full sound. Because they’re so acoustic in their recordings, they don’t disappoint when you see them live. Now if I had only said THAT to them when I met them in the autograph queue, rather than mumble something patronising about liking their new songs. If you only have 30 seconds with someone you gotta plan, right?

And Mum: they looked me in the eye. (She likes that in a celebrity.)